Disclosure ref: 11 sent 11.6

Freedom of Information Act 2000 Request

Request

How many prosecutions have occurred as a result of:

a) People being harmed as a result of drugs they have bought online from illegal websites b) People dying as a result of drugs that have bought online from illegal websites c) People being harmed as a result of drugs they have bought from legal sites (such as online prescribing doctor services), where the poor care given by the pharmacist or doctor or company was the cause of the death. d) People dying as a result of drugs they have bought from legal sites (such as online prescribing doctor services) where poor care given by the pharmacist or doctor or company was the cause of the death.

Please provide this for the last 5 calendar years and break the numbers down per year.

Our response

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not maintain a central record identifying the circumstances as described in your request. To identify the situations you have described, a manual examination of case files would be required. As an indication of the work that a manual examination would involve, there were prosecutions in respect of 549,793 defendants in 2017.

Section 12(1) of the Act means public authorities are not obliged to comply with a request for information if it estimates the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for central government is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3.5 working days determining whether the department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

We believe that the time required for us to review cases involving in excess of 549,793 defendants, to establish whether the offences were prosecuted following the purchase of drugs, legally or illegally, which then resulted in harm or death, would exceed the appropriate cost limit as set out in the FOI Act referred to above.

Information Management Unit 020 3357 0899 IMU@cps.gov.uk